To Keep the Wizards Away
by leighismyname
Summary: Hermione, Ron, and Harry run from the Malfoy Manor, finding trouble as usual, though this time from a small, innocent boy planting macadamia nuts on a vacant farm. One-Shot. Not DH compatible.


**this is my first story in this universe, no flames please.**

 **i wrote this from a prompt on pinterest without the intention of it getting to Harry Potter, but here I am. if this is too confusing to understand, pm me, i can explain it. sorry.**

 **disclaimer: anything you recognize isn't mine.**

 **please enjoy.**

* * *

She ran, faster than she had before, her two friends beside her. The only sounds came from footsteps on the crackling leaves and twigs, and their strangled breaths.

She gulped, her throat dry from leaving it open for so long. Her lungs ached, her legs begged for mercy, her entire body felt numb but suffering terribly. She pushed on.

Subconsciously, she tightened her grip on her wand, feeling reassured by it's place in her hand. She tried to think of a spell, any possible spell to make her able to keep running for miles, but not one came to mind. She could barely think of a simple light charm, her mind so muddled.

She could, however, think of every solitary second of what previously happened to her. She could see the sneer on the wicked witches's face as she screamed curse after curse. She could still feel the effects of it on her body. Her ribs throbbing, her heart beating more erratically than should be normal. Yet, she pushed on, hoping to get away fast enough.

After a while, the woods opened up to a clearing. They seemed to be on some sort of farm, and past the huge barn was a huge cliff drop, seemingly dropping to more miles of grassland.

The three of them slowed their run upon seeing a small boy sitting in the grass. He couldn't've been older than five or six. He sat digging in the grass and placing small nuts in the ground, then covering them with soil and pouring water over it from a small pail he held in his free hand.

She watched him for a moment, the boy didn't seem to notice the three teenagers standing above him. One of her friends looked back at the forest behind them, it looked eerily silent, and the three made eye contact. It was too undisrupted.

The boy finally noticed them and he looked up, a pouch of seeds in his hands and his face scrunched from the beaming sun. "Hello, there," one of her friends said to the boy, he was tall with bright red hair and more freckles than you'd think.

The boy looked back to his small piles of dirt and continued digging. "My granny said I shouldn't talk to strangers." He had an accent. An odd one, too. It was British mixed with an American Southern and she wondered where exactly they were for him to sound like that. She wasn't exactly thinking when she Apparated them here.

She looked around them. To her right was a slope leading down to a small farm house. On the porch was an old lady, possibly the boys granny, asleep in a rocking chair. Cliche enough, she had a ball of yarn and a halfway finished sweater in her lap.

She directed her attention back to the little boy. While pointing to herself and her two friends, she told the boy their names. "See," she said. "Now we're not strangers."

The boy found this good enough and introduced himself.

Her redheaded friend, Ron, shifted his feet and asked, "Do you happen to know where we are?" Her slightly shorter and black haired friend with circle glasses, Harry, smacked the back of his friends arm.

The redhead frowned at his friend.

The little boy didn't answer, instead he turned sideways, now facing right, and started making another line of holes, then planting his seeds and watering them.

She figured a different approach might work. Kneeling down towards him, she asked, "What are you planting?"

The boy looked up at her as he finished patting the dirt on the ground. As she examined, the boy had created a circle of small juvenile plants around him. All small patches of dirt clumps. She knew that under the small mounds of wet dirt would be a nut. He seemed to be planting macadamias.

What she found peculiar, though, was how he did it. If this boy had lived on this farm his whole life, why did he plant them so close to him, why in a circle when he should know that such thing could never grow? And why macadamia nuts? She knew that the boy was young, but surely he couldn't be that incompetent when it came to differentiating seeds and nuts.

The boy stood in his small circle of seeds and brushed off his hands, he had dirt stains on his knees.

Harry nervously patted her arm and pointed to the small farmhouse where the granny seemed to be waking.

The boy said, "My granny said to plant them to keep the wizards away."

She looked at the boy, he had wide blue eyes and an indefinite innocent look on his face, he must be joking, she thought.

But as the granny stormed up the hill, the sky turn grey, and the ground rumble under their feet, she knew they weren't finished running for the day.


End file.
